Emperor of Thorns

The amount of relief that suggestion brought surprised me. ‘I came to kill you, Qalasadi. To lay waste to your domain and leave behind ruination.’

He had the grace or commonsense not to smirk at my apocalyptic turn of phrase. Most likely they knew of Gelleth even in Afrique. Perhaps they saw the glare of it, rising above the horizon. Lord knows it burned bright enough, and high? It scorched heaven!

‘I hope that you will not,’ said Qalasadi.

‘Hope?’ I drew my robe aside, setting hand to hilt. ‘You don’t know?’

‘All men need hope, Jorg. Even men of numbers.’ Yusuf pressed a smile onto his lips, his voice soft, the voice of a man ready to die.

‘And what do your equations say of me, poisoner?’ My sword stood between us now. I had no recollection of drawing it. The rage I needed flared and died, flared again. I saw my grandfather and grandmother laid out pale on the deathbed, Uncle Robert in a warrior’s tomb, hands folded across the blade upon his chest. I saw Qalasadi’s smile in a sunlit courtyard. Yusuf wiping the sea from his face. ‘Salty!’ he had said. ‘Let’s hope the world has better to offer than that, no?’ Words spoken at sea.

I slammed my sword hilt onto the table’s polished wood. ‘What do your calculations say?’ A roar that made them flinch.

‘Two,’ Qalasadi said.

‘Two?’ A laugh tore out of me, sharp-edged, full of hurting.

He bowed his head. ‘Two.’

Yusuf ran a finger across pages of scrawl. ‘Two.’

‘It’s what the magic gives us,’ Qalasadi said.

Something cold tingled at my cheekbones. ‘Why two?’

And the mathmagician frowned, as he had in the courtyard at Castle Morrow, as if trying once again to remember that lost sensation, to recall a forgotten taste.

‘Two friends lost in dry-lands? Two friends to be made in the desert? Two years away from your throne? Two women who will own your heart? Two decades you will live?’ The magic lies in the first number, the mathematics in the second.’

‘And what is the second number?’ Anger left me, the remaining image two sad mounds in the dirt of the Iberico, fading.

‘The second number,’ Qalasadi said, without checking his papers, ‘is 333000054500.’

‘Now that is a number! None of these twos, threes, and fourteens you plague me with. What the hell does it mean?’

‘It is, I hope, the coordinates where you abandoned Michael.’

35

Five years earlier

It came as something of a relief to discover the order of mathmagicians didn’t require my death, as it seemed likely they could have arranged to take it, certainly after I’d delivered myself into their hands with such cunning. Also good to learn that they now considered there were better routes than those that led to Morrow, other ways to place the necessary voting power into Ibn Fayed’s hands and to assure the Prince of Arrow’s ascendance. It meant that I in turn did not require their death.

It is true that I had a bad record with soothsayers and the like predicting glory for Orrin of Arrow. For once, however, I felt able to step around it and move on. Maybe I was growing up. I comforted myself with Fexler’s words about the changing world and the power of desire. Perhaps for those whose burning desire was to know the future rather than live in the present, perhaps for them it was that desire more than the means they employed that gave them some blurry window onto tomorrow. Whether it be Danelore witches casting rune stones, or clever Moors with equations of fiendish complexity, maybe their raw and focused desire delivered their insights. And if my desire were the greater, maybe I would prove them wrong.

The need for vengeance, for retribution against Qalasadi after his attempt on my family, had never burned so bright as the imperative that took me to Uncle Renar’s door. In fact it felt good to let it drop. Lundist and the Nuban would have been proud of me, but in truth I liked the man and it was that rather than any newfound strength of character that allowed me to set it aside.

In some chamber above us a mechanism whirred and a great bell began to sound out the hour of the day.

‘Yusuf and I will accompany you to the caliph’s court,’ Qalasadi said, voice raised.

‘He won’t want to execute me? Or lock me in a cell?’ I asked.

‘He knows you are here, so whether you go to court with us, or are taken there later under armed guard, is unlikely to change events,’ Qalasadi said.

‘Though if his soldiers have to drag you there, projections do slide toward less desirable outcomes,’ Yusuf added.

‘But you have already calculated what will happen?’ I frowned at Yusuf.

‘Yes.’ A nod.

‘And?’

‘And telling you will make the outcome less certain.’ Qalasadi closed the book he had just opened and picked it up. Yusuf threw an arm over my shoulders and steered me toward the door.

‘And Kalal stays here?’ I asked above the tenth and loudest intonation of the bell.

Yusuf grinned. ‘The sums don’t do themselves, you know.’

To their credit neither Qalasadi or Yusuf raised an eyebrow at the tower’s lack of a front door, and I guessed it was not one that would be easy to replace. The younger men in their whites, still with the blackened teeth, alarming in their wrongness, had gathered the fragments together in a small sad heap to one side of the doorway, and others from within the mathema had joined them. Several dozen of the students sat in a circle, murmuring, passing crystal pieces amongst one another, the occasional cry going up when they found two fragments that matched. They fell silent as we passed.

‘I see you found a new solution to the door, Jorg,’ Yusuf said, his voice dry.

‘It presents a better puzzle now,’ Qalasadi said, ‘though one that is less of an obstacle.’

We crossed the plaza under the sun’s blaze. You could almost see the lake boiling away, but it put a hint of coolness in the air, a blessing worth more than gold in the Sahar. The steps up to the caliph’s gates were broad and many, larger than steps made for men, deceiving the eye so that as you climbed the true size of the palace became apparent in a slow dawning.

Supplicants queued on the steps in the shade of a grand portico. Gates, that looked to be made of gold, towered above us all, and royal guards in polished steel stood ready to receive the caliph’s visitors, bright and faintly ridiculous plumes bobbing above conical helms. Qalasadi and Yusuf bypassed the score and more of black-robed petitioners. I spared a smile for Marco, wedged in the midst of the locals and struggling to heft his trunk up another step.

‘As-salamu alaykum.’ Qalasadi wished peace upon the giant who stepped to bar our way. A sensible wish given the size of the scimitar at the man’s hip. Hachirahs, Tutor Lundist’s book had called them, their blades sufficient to hack a man in two.

‘As-salamu alaykum, murshid mathema.’ The man bowed, but not so low that one might stab him unawares.

More words exchanged in the shared tongue of Maroc and Liba. I had enough of it to judge that Qalasadi was assuring the guard of my royal status, despite appearances to the contrary. It might have been politic to spend some time and some gold cleaning off the desert and dressing the part, but it seemed wiser to meet with Ibn Fayed before Marco gained an audience.